Today, every front-line combatant who goes into battle against the enemy is supported by people who stand behind him. The further back you look, the greater the number of supporters. Even 50 years ago every pilot of RAF Fighter Command was probably immediately backed up by about 100 people, with many times more in other places.
When a nation is totally at war almost everyone can be said to have a supporting role, but in the Battle of Britain this stage had not yet been reached. Despite grave reverses, the British nation had sky-high morale and not much else. Even the Army was still largely shocked and lacking weapons left behind at Dunkirk. So the effective support to ‘The Few’ was provided by organisations that had been set up years beforehand. Politicians love to think that one can ignore war and then make good the deficiency by a few days of intense effort. Even in 1940 that was nonsense. Had crucial decisions not been taken years beforehand the battle would unquestionably have been lost.
To some degree Britain enjoyed many giant strokes of good luck. The dying R. J. Mitchell at Supermarine (Aviation) designed the Type 300, later named Spitfire, as a purely private venture (PV). Indeed, his boss, Sir Robert McClean, wrote to the Air Ministry, ‘After unfruitful discussions with the Air Ministry, my opposite number in Rolls-Royce, the late A. F. Sidgreaves, and I decided that the two companies together should themselves finance the building of such an aircraft. The Air Ministry was informed of this decision, and were told that in no circumstances would any technical member of the Air Ministry be consulted or allowed to interfere with the designer.’
Hawker’s chief designer, Sydney Camm, would never have dreamed of writing such a letter, but the fact remains that Britain’s most important Battle of Britain fighter, the Hurricane, was likewise a PV design. Though he kept the Air Ministry informed, Camm’s design was entirely his own and, like the Spitfire, the Hurricane had an Air Ministry specification written around it after it had been completely drawn by Camm’s ‘young gentlemen’ at Canbury Park Road. Had the two firms merely built to the official specification – the uninspired F. 7/30, using a 680hp Goshawk engine – there would have been no chance of Fighter Command winning in 1940.
In the case of the Hurricane a further factor was that, showing unprecedented nerve in an industry not yet used to massive financial risk, the Board of the newly formed Hawker Siddeley Group decided in March 1936 to produce all the drawings, factory plans and everything else needed for production of 1,000 Hurricanes. Land was found at Langley, near Slough, Buckinghamshire, and a large new factory built specifically for the Hurricane. This unprecedented act, long before the Air Ministry had drawn up any contract, was later estimated to have resulted in Fighter Command receiving between 400 and 600 essential extra Hurricanes by August 1940.
What about the Merlin engine, which powered both the Hurricane and Spitfire, as well as the Defiant and many other RAF aircraft? Without it RAF Fighter Command could hardly have existed, yet it too owed nothing to any Air Ministry requirement. Whereas in 1925 Air Marshal Trenchard had almost forced Rolls-Royce to get back into aviation with a new engine for the RAF, in the early 1930s the official view was that the Goshawk, a steam-cooled version of the old Kestrel, would be the preferred engine for the next generation of fighters. With a capacity of 21 litres (1,292 cu in), the Goshawk was unlikely to get much beyond 700hp. Sir Henry Royce could see that more power would be needed, and authorised the go-ahead on a bigger and newer engine, the PV 12 (private venture, 12 cylinder). Royce died on the day the last PV 12 drawing was issued (April 22, 1933). The first engine ran on October 15, 1933. Only at this point did the Ministry offer to finance detailed development, the PV 12 thereupon becoming the Merlin.
The company extended the factories at Derby several times, and in 1938 began building an enormous new works at Crewe just in time for Crewe-built Merlins to fly in the Battle of Britain. Other Merlin factories got into action later.
One vital factor often overlooked in accounts of the Battle of Britain was the power increase RAF aircraft gained from using 100-octane fuel. To get to an octane rating of 100 demanded a very complicated process which, done on a commercial scale, called for large and expensive refinery plant. Though Dr S. F. Birch, of Anglo-Iranian’s laboratory at Sunburyon-Thames, was the pioneer of this ‘alkylation’ process, it was the US Army Air Corps that pioneered 100-octane aviation fuel. Probably nothing would have happened in Britain had it not been for a great engine man, Air Commodore Rod Banks, who in January 1937 urged that RAF engines should be able to use 100-octane ‘even if the supply of such fuel were limited, because the use of high-duty equipment might prove decisive in the air in the early stages of a war’.
Accordingly, two British engines, one of them the Merlin, were tested and developed to run on 100-octane, which was available only from abroad. Eventually an outstanding fuel called BAM.100 (British Air Ministry 100) was developed and the first cargo was shipped to Britain from the the Esso refinery at Aruba in June 1939. The Air Ministry stockpiled the valuable fuel, which was dyed a distinctive green: this fact remained unknown to German intelligence. This stockpiling went on throughout the war, but in May 1940, when the chips were down and everything counted, the RAF began to use the special fuel, in Merlins of Fighter Command. At a stroke the maximum boost was doubled, from 6lb (1.36ata) to 12lb (1.82ata), increasing maximum power from 1,030hp to 1,310hp. This significant increase made a major difference to the Hurricane and Spitfire. It brought the former pretty much up to the level of the Bf 109E, when it would otherwise have had a distinctly lower performance. As for the Spitfire, it gave that aircraft a vital edge, despite the fact that its rival was smaller yet had a bigger engine. This again was long-distance foresight.
A further factor was that, whereas both the Hurricane and Spitfire had gone into service with crude fixed-pitch two-blade wooden propellers, by mid-1940 almost all had three-blade constant-speed propellers giving better take-off, faster climb and better high-speed performance. One of the first re-propellered Hurricanes was used by F/O ‘Cobber’ Kain in France to shoot down a Do 17 from 27,000ft (8,230m), and it was officially stated that the enemy bomber could never have been intercepted without the improved propeller. Fitting controllable-pitch propellers, followed by constant-speed propellers, was a crash programme involving round-the-clock work by the two manufacturers, de Havilland and Rotol.
It is difficult to explain the apparent lack of interest shown by the Air Ministry between the World Wars in aircraft armament. To some degree it may be explained by lack of money, but at the eleventh hour available foreign guns were evaluated and the choice fell on the rifle-calibre Browning and 20mm Hispano-Suiza. Both dated from World War I, but in the absence of anything newer preparations were urgently made to have both guns manufactured under licence in Britain. Because of their ancient design, neither gun was really competitive in the context of World War II, but they were at least eventually made reliable. The Hispano cannon was made by British MARC (Manufacturing and Research Co.) at Grantham, but it played only a very minor role in the Battle of Britain (though Hawker Aircraft had proposed a four-20mm Hurricane in January 1936). Most of the cannon-armed aircraft in the Battle were Spitfires, but very few pilots at that time thought the bigger gun an advantage. The Browning modified to fire British rimmed 0.303in ammunition was virtually the standard gun of the RAF fighters and it was made under Colt Automatic Weapon Corporation licence by BSA (Birmingham Small Arms)
Of course, both the new monoplane fighters had their guns mounted well outboard inside the wings, where almost all previous RAF fighters had had them in the fuselage. In the traditional installation the pilot could clear stoppages (he often carried a mallet for this purpose) and recock the weapon to continue firing. He could no longer do this with the Hurricane and Spitfire, and moreover the Dunlop company had to devise and supply electrically controlled pneumatic cocking and firing systems. Other companies provided hot air ducts to prevent the gun lubricant from freezing at the unprecedented heights at which combats could now take place.
Of course, guns are useless unless they can be aimed accurately. Unless a fighter is directly astern of its target the pilot has to ‘aim off’. He has to aim at a point ahead of the enemy so that the bullets and the enemy aircraft (EA) arrive at the same place at the same time. In extreme cases the lead angle – the angular distance between the sightline to the target and the direction of aim – can be as great as 11 degrees. Few pilots survived long enough in combat to master this, so from the mid-1950s the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough tried to devise a sight that would do this automatically. In 1937 it finalised the design of the gyro gunsight (GGS), in which a rapidly spinning mirror is mounted on a Hooke’s (universal) joint connecting it to a hemisphere of thin copper rotating between the poles of powerful magnets. This sight, for the first time, enabled the pilot to fly his fighter so that an illuminated ring was centred on the target, the lead angle, and even the gravity drop of the bullets, being automatically allowed for.
Many prototypes of the GGS were used to great effect in the Battle of Britain, but they were still the exception. The sight was licensed to Ferranti, whose new factory at Edinburgh was built to make the GGS and began deliveries in 1942. The standard sight in 1940 was the newly introduced reflector sight, which projected an illuminated ring, usually with a central cross, on to an oval glass behind the armoured windscreen. The only adjustment the pilot could make was to vary the size of the ring, and if he knew the span of the target he could obtain a range indication (most pilots in the Battle tended to open fire at far too long a range). The Hurricanes and Spitfires almost always had a traditional ring-and-bead sight as well. Some pilots in 1940 actually used this, as being simple and fool-proof, but it was really provided as a standby aiming system in case of failure of the electrical system.
Unquestionably, the greatest aid to accurate aiming was looking at the results of practice combats on cine film. The need to carry a ‘camera gun’ was agreed only immediately before the war, and it proved its worth from the first day. Apart from being a marvellous training aid it was a reliable witness to actual combat, and could confirm or refute a pilot’s claims made in his Combat Report. All the cameras used by Fighter Command in the battle were standard 16mm products from Williamson Manufacturing Co., of London (Willesden) and Reading.
In the Battle of Britain radio assumed a totally new importance. During the 1930s it had been standard practice for defending fighters to mount a standing patrol across the expected line of approach of enemy bombers and at what was considered a likely altitude. In actual war this would have been far too costly in terms of engine hours, fuel, pilot fatigue and on many other counts, and with the Luftwaffe able to attack from an arc ranging from Norway to Spain the whole idea would have been impractical. Radio had been introduced by the British to enable ground controllers to transmit details of enemy attacks to squadrons on standing patrol, the source of the intelligence being the Observer Corps. Radio also enabled squadron and flight commanders to issue commands to their pilots and of course in actual combat it was needed almost constantly by everyone involved, both to shout warnings and instructions and to listen for others.
The ubiquitous TR.9D was a high frequency (HF) set. It was connected to a wire antenna (aerial) loosely slung between a rigid mast projecting vertically above the rear fuselage and the top of the rudder. Despite careful screening of the engine ignition system, interference (static) was invariably obtrusive and often deafening. Probably more than half ‘The Few’ were seldom able to understand the clipped bursts of noise that assailed their ears, and ‘say again’ became one of the most common transmissions.
In 1939 Hawker’s civil trial installation Hurricane G-AFKX was fitted with, among other things, the first very high frequency (VHF) radio, TR.1133. This worked with marvellous clarity, and it also needed only simple ‘whip antenna’ offering hardly any drag, but it was fitted to only a few aircraft in the Battle of Britain. The first aircraft in service with VHF was Spitfire R6833 of No. 19 Sqn on August 20, 1940. It was to be 1942 before all the old HF sets had been replaced in Fighter Command.
Two completely new radio functions were introduced just in time for the Battle. One was IFF (identification friend or foe), a semi-automatic method in which a friendly radio station, especially in a fighter, would ‘interrogate’ all aircraft in the vicinity. Friendly aircraft would instantly and automatically respond with a very short coded signal, which would be changed frequently to prevent it from being copied by the enemy. Absence of such a response would brand the aircraft as ‘not friendly’, and in wartime this tended to be equated with ‘hostile’. The other new asset was radio D/F. Direction finding by radio was not new, but it had never before been available to enable a ground controller to keep track of the position of fighter formations. Each Sector Commander had two or three specially built D/F stations which received signals automatically transmitted at regular intervals by particular fighters, giving an almost immediate indication of bearing.
In 1934 the Air Ministry, in the person of scientist Percival Rowe, became concerned that the file on how science could help air defence contained only a few more or less useless pieces of paper. A special committee was formed, and in January 1935 the Director of Scientific Research, Dr H. E. Wimperis, sought the opinion of the top radio expert, Dr Robert Watson Watt, on whether it would be theoretically possible to build a ‘death ray’, an idea much in vogue in the popular press and works of fiction. The eminent physicist replied that, for practical purposes, the answer was ‘No’. Almost all civil servants would have left it at that, but ‘Wattie’ added a little comment that had not been asked for, and by so doing he changed history and almost certainly changed the outcome of the Battle of Britain and of World War II.
He casually pointed out that, to destroy an enemy bomber with a ‘death ray’ you had to aim the ray precisely at the bomber. No way of doing this existed but Watson Watt suggested that, though this had not been mentioned, it should be possible to use radio methods to detect and locate hostile aircraft. The committee studied the idea on January 28, 1935. On February 26, Rowe and two assistants parked an ancient van in a field about ten miles from the powerful BBC transmitting station at Daventry. They set up a receiving antenna and connected it to a cathode-ray tube (CRT). Soon they heard the drone of Kestrel engines. It was a biplane Heyford bomber, flying a prearranged track overhead. As expected, the bright green line across the face of the CRT grew a small spike or ‘blip’. As the bomber passed overhead the blip moved along the display and grew until it was big and impressive. Then it shrank, as it moved to the other side of the tube. Rowe could not only follow the bomber’s track but he could have told the pilot that he was a few hundred feet off to one side of the prescribed route.
This triggered off a gigantic programme of thinking, planning, designing, building, manning and testing the first air-defence radar chain in the world. It started on July 24, 1935 when an historic set of photographs was taken of the CRT display at the pioneer RAF radar station at Orfordness in Suffolk. Clearly visible, in eight pictures of the display from 1126hrs to nearly 1216hrs, were the blips (echoes) from a Westland Wallace, two Hawker Harts, a single Hart and an unknown aircraft. By the outbreak of war the Chain Home (CH) stations sprouted their huge 350ft (107m) steel towers all round the coast from the Isle of Wight to the tip of Scotland.
The CH stations could clearly see aircraft at a height of 15,000ft (4,572m) for a distance of at least 40 miles (64km). In some cases the range was greater, and during the Battle of Britain the vital stations from Ventnor (Isle of Wight) round to Kent could actually watch the Luftwaffe formations forming up over France and Belgium before starting to cross the Channel. These big stations operated on a wavelength of 33ft (10m) They could not detect aircraft flying at low levels, and so from September 1939 a second row of stations was added to plug the gap. Called Chain Home Low (CHL), they operated on only 5ft (1.5m) wavelength with rotating antenna arrays on top of 185ft (56m) and 20ft (6m) towers. They could see a fighter speeding in at only just above sea level, out to a distance of up to 30 miles. By August 1940 the CHL stations stretched right round South and East England and up to the Shetlands.
Thus, throughout the Battle of Britain, every raid by the Luftwaffe was detected as soon as it took off and kept under continuous radar surveillance as it approached the English coast. In the crucial years 1937–39 the entire RAF defence network was perfected, the information from all the radar stations being collected and sifted at Filter Centres and the overall battle control from Sector, Group and finally Fighter Command plotting rooms, the command room being at Bentley Priory, Stanmore. The central feature of the Operations Room at Fighter Command was a giant map of Great Britain, arranged horizontally at table height. The land area was divided into about 130 Warning Districts, in each of which, depending on the threat situation, a Warning or an All Clear would be sounded, the first by a distinctive rising and falling note on powerful sirens and the latter by a steady note. There were many subsidiary arrangements, all concerned with the population at large and quite separate from the direct telephone lines to the Fighter Command stations.
The radar observers who, like the plotters, were mainly members of the Womens’ Auxiliary Air Force (WAAF) soon became extremely skilled not only at estimating target ranges, which were relatively easy, but also target bearings, heights and numbers, which were more difficult. The existence of this nationwide radar barrier meant that if an RAF squadron scrambled it was almost bound to meet the enemy and engage in combat. Detailed instructions on the enemy’s movements could be radioed by the Controllers right up to joining battle, with the hoped-for added advantage of getting into a favourable (eg, up-sun) position beforehand.
In 1940 the CH and CHL radars looked out to sea but had very limited performance in the other direction, over land. Therefore, enormous responsibility continued to be placed on the Observer Corps, which expanded in numbers to 32,000, refined its methods and manned 1,400 posts during the Battle of Britain. The Corps received the prefix ‘Royal’ in 1941. Among their many duties was immediate and accurate reporting of the location of every crashed aircraft and every parachuted pilot or crew-member, both over land and off the coast. In the latter case the RAF’s ever-alert air/sea rescue service would swing into action, using fast power boats and Supermarine Walrus amphibians to fish friend and foe alike out of the Channel.
Unfortunately, parachutists over England were almost automatically judged to be German, and many RAF fighter pilots were shot at or in other ways attacked by the Army and newly formed Local Defence Volunteers (later named Home Guard). The most famous example was Fighter Command’s F/Lt J. B. Nicolson VC, who was almost burned to death in the air and did not really need sustained rifle fire (fortunately inaccurate) as he descended. Another task of ‘the Brown Jobs’ was to guard crashed aircraft, though when convenient this was also done by armed RAF personnel. Every recognisable Luftwaffe wreck was carefully examined by Intelligence Officers. Indeed, it was a single scrap of paper examined by British Intelligence which alerted the RAF to the fact that the Luftwaffe bombers were using radio beams for precision guidance.
Intelligence plays a central and crucial role in any modern war. Through abysmal intelligence in the late 1930s the aircraft of the Luftwaffe were largely unknown in Britain. Even their designations were often invented, such as ‘Me 109’ and ‘He 111K Mk Va’. Quite suddenly, from the summer of 1940 southern England became littered with the aircraft themselves, and there was no ignorance any more. In particular, each type was found to have weaknesses, which the RAF quickly learned to exploit. But at an even higher level, British Intelligence surpassed itself, in a way that perhaps can never be repeated. Thanks in part to the Poles and French, the ultra-secret Enigma machines, used by the German armed forces to encode all radio messages, were ‘broken’ by a combination of brilliant thinking, fantastic electro-mechanical devices and, at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire, the ceaseless labours of large teams of cryptoanalysts. In his book The Ultra Secret former RAF intelligence officer F. W. Winterbotham explained how glad Lord Dowding was to avail himself of the content of Luftwaffe operational messages, which in effect gave him, on a daily basis, the policy of Goering himself.
In the 1930s the RAF controlled all repairs to aircraft, and did a great deal itself in 43 Group. On May 14, 1940 the Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP) was established under the dynamic Lord Beaverbrook, who personally masterminded the expansion of a gigantic Civilian Repair Organisation (CRO) which was dispersed even more widely than the parent aircraft factories. MAP also created order out of chaos and by the time of the Battle of Britain had more or less solved countless problems and shortages and got airframes, engines and accessories not only made at maximum rate but also – and this was vitally important during the Battle – repaired at maximum rate. It is on record that one Hurricane was shot down three times during the Battle, while a Spitfire got through the Battle with five different propellers.
With such a massive programme of aircraft production and repair it was recognised in 1939 that tremendous manpower would be needed merely to ferry aircraft from one place to another and to deliver them to Britain’s Service units. The answer was the Air Transport Auxiliary (ATA). It was formed on September 1, 1939 by G. (later Sir Gerard) d’Erlanger, and made use of amateur and quasi-professional pilots, men and women, and mostly aged 30 to 50. Naturally the authorities were horrified at such a novel idea, and poured the ATA candidates into the front seats of Harvards and Blenheims in the hope that they would fail. Nearly all made the grade, and indeed on January 1, 1940 an all-female Ferry Pool was opened at Hatfield. The ATA eventually numbered 650 pilots who, though civilian, wore distinctive dark blue uniform. During the war they made over 300,000 deliveries of every kind of RAF and RN aircraft, in every kind of weather, with no armament and no radio. In summer 1940 the ATA was really getting into its stride, and it played an important part.
Of course, other important roles were played by ground-based defensive systems, notably anti-aircraft (AA) guns and the balloon barrage. At this time the RAF Regiment had yet to be formed, and all AA units were part of the Army. AA Command covered the whole country, large sub-areas being allocated to particular divisions. Heavy AA (HA) guns, notably the 3.7in (94mm) and 4.5in (114mm), could engage Luftwaffe aircraft of 1940 up to their practical ceiling, but even when targets were visible it was difficult to aim accurately, and actual expenditure of ammunition per kill was higher than the figures recorded at the time. Firing on unseen targets (above cloud or at night) had essentially no more than a morale-boosting effect. In the same way, searchlights served a useful purpose at night in giving a general indication of where targets were to be found, to night fighters, but because they were linked with sound locators they had little hope of illuminating targets (it was a very different story later when individual lights had their own target-tracking radar).
Engagements during the Battle took place at all heights from 35,000ft (10,670m) down to sea level. At lower levels what was later to be called ‘light flak’ was very important, but Britain suffered from lack of weapons. Had it not been for belated adoption in 1938 of the Swedish 2pdr (40mm) Bofors the situation might have been called ridiculous. As it was, Bofors guns were available in pitifully small numbers, and – hand-loaded with clips of four – could get off only a few rounds against a fast low-flying target. Britain had no equivalent of the deadly light flak that travelled with the German armies, notably twin-37mm and quad (flak-vierling) 20mm guns, available in thousands.
The balloon barrage was deployed in increasing numbers from 1938 onwards. The primary purpose of the barrage, formed by kite balloons moored by strong steel cables, was to prevent hostile aircraft from attacking at low level. The balloons seldom rode above 5,000ft (1,524m), and were disposed around London and such cities as Southampton, Portsmouth, Dover and the Medway towns, and from coastal convoys. Later in the war they were responsible for the loss of numerous Allied aircraft and almost none of the Luftwaffe, but in the autumn of 1940 their presence did exert a significant extra demoralising effect on Luftwaffe aircrew. The balloons were organised into RAF squadrons, numbered from 900 upwards, each sub-divided into flights and with balloon spacing a compromise between the ideal, on the one hand, and the available and accessible sites on the other.
This matter of sites was crucial, yet at no time did any branch of the armed forces use high-handed tactics and commandeer sites. During the year between Munich and the war, sufficient sites had been obtained through the laborious legal processes to satisfy almost every need of the defence forces throughout the Battle. This was especially important in the case of airfields, which of course (even in 1940) were much larger than sites for AA guns or balloon vehicles. Time and again it was demonstrated that the best way to allow aircraft to survive on the ground was dispersal. In 1940 repeated and prolonged attacks on airfields destroyed remarkably few aircraft, and the large numbers of satellite fields enabled operations to be maintained even after heavy damage to the main airfields. Fortunately the Battle took place at a time of year when personnel could live under canvas and work on aircraft in the open without discomfort.
The RAF had just begun to construct paved (invariably tarmac) runways at the start of the war. Fighter Command’s aircraft did not need runways, and almost all take-offs during the Battle (on both sides, in fact) were from grass. Bomb craters in grass are relatively easy to fill in, but large craters in the paved areas around the hangars – which is where most bombs were aimed – were another matter. Despite stockpiling of hardcore months beforehand, during the most crucial phases of the Battle, when the Luftwaffe was concentrating its attacks on the fighter airfields, craters were being made faster than they could be filled and resurfaced. Modern earthmoving machinery did not exist, and the first bulldozers arrived with US forces in 1942.
Damage to houses and other civilian property did not begin in earnest until near the end of the Battle, and repairing such damage was not then a serious drain on resources. Thus, until late September almost all efforts could be directed towards repairing, or at least rendering usable, such vital structures as radars, hangars and telephone lines (which formed the links between all parts of the air defence system).
The Battle of Britain was the first time the RAF had been called upon to attend to injuries to its personnel on a large scale. Casualties now included not only aircrew but also personnel on the ground. From the formation of the Service it had possessed a Medical Branch, under an Air Vice Marshal, and in 1919 an RAF hospital was opened at Halton, greatly enlarged and improved in 1928 as part of the Princess Mary’s RAF Nursing Service (PMRAFNS). Suddenly in 1940 it was overloaded, and in particular, it was inundated with serious burn cases. A special burns unit was opened at Halton during the Battle, and it grew rapidly in size and skill, soon becoming a world leader alongside the civilian unit at East Grinstead under Sir Archibald McIndoe. Another major PMRAFNS hospital was opened near RAF Wroughton, Swindon. The RAF also became famous for its Institute of Aviation Medicine at Farnborough, but this is concerned primarily with physiological research rather than treatment.
With hindsight we know that Hitler had not expected to find Germany at war with Britain (at least, not yet) and genuinely wanted to find an ‘out’ – some kind of negotiated settlement which would leave him in undisputed control of the European continent. The summer of 1940 found Germany’s armed forces totally victorious throughout mainland Europe; the untried philosophy of Blitzkrieg – lightning war, ironically invented and described in detail by British officers who were ignored in their own country – had proved itself unstoppable. Hitler’s real ambitions lay to the East, but quite unexpectedly he found he had a foe separated by 21 miles (34km) of water. On June 25, 1940 his troops were exhausted, but their morale was sky-high. There seemed to be just about time to invade and subdue this unexpected enemy before the bad weather of the winter set in.
With his eyes fixed on the Soviet Union it was also a surprise to Hitler to find his forces in command of the whole of northern France, the Low Countries, Denmark and Norway. This was especially gratifying to the Luftwaffe, which was thus placed in a perfect position to carry out the orders of Goering, its bombastic leader, to eliminate the RAF as a fighting force. Strategically, the situation was ideal. The Luftwaffe had at its disposal over 120 airfields within Bf 109E range of southern England, and after surveying all of them more than 50 were selected as main airfields for Luftflotte 3, in the west, and Luftflotte 2, in eastern France and the Low Countries. Many other good airfields in Denmark and Norway became home to Luftflotte 5, and this forced the RAF to maintain substantial fighter forces in northern England and Scotland.
Virtually the whole strength of the Luftwaffe ranged against the RAF No. 11 and No. 10 Groups comprised units of Luftflotte 2 (Fliegerkorps I, II and IX, and the fighters of Jagdfliegerführer 2) and Luftflotte 3 (FlKps IV, V and VIII and the fighters of Jagdfliegerführer 3). Either of these ought to have been a match for RAF Fighter Command. By mid-July their 50 main bases and approximately the same number of satellite airfields had been made fully operational and stocked with preliminary supplies of fuel and ordnance. Supplies continued to be built up, using trains and Ju 52/3ms, until the main assault began on 8 August. For the longer term, a modest programme of airfield improvements began, concerned chiefly with providing paved runways and taxiways and luxurious living quarters, but the West was not expected to be more than a garrison theatre. All the long-term campaign plans continued to be directed towards the East.
The propaganda ministry of Josef Goebbels incessantly stated that the war in the West had already been won, and their view was actually reflected in German decisions and planning. Aircraft production was increased in early 1940 in readiness for the attrition of the campaign in Scandinavia and especially, in the West. Monthly output after the battles in Poland was 495 aircraft in February 1940, with single-shift working and a 40-hour week. Without altering the working week, output was boosted in April to 990, and to a peak of 1,205 in September. This peak resulted from the inevitable lag between issuing orders and getting results; it had nothing to do with the Battle of Britain. In fact, orders had gone out to reduce production in early July, just after the fall of France, and output fell to 930 in October 1940 and a mere 693 in November. It stayed around the 700 mark until the forthcoming campaign in the East forced it to rise to over 1,000 once more. Subsequently, gigantic fighter production was to push the figure beyond 4,300 in 1944. Thus, there was never any expectation of any real problem in subduing the RAF, and the 1,653 front-line combat aircraft actually shot down in the Battle of Britain took a long time to replace. All of this took place at a time long before the political frictions and traumatic upheavals that were to afflict German production later in the war.
From the start, the Luftwaffe was to some extent an élite force. It concentrated upon war in the air, a mission which it saw as including training of most of its personnel. This broad mission also included the provision of flak (AA artillery). Nearly all secondary functions were assigned to a secondary force, the Luftdienst (air service). This was essentially a civilian organisation, though it came to include large numbers of personnel from the Luftwaffe and other forces who were wounded or in any other way medically unfit for combat duty. The Luftdienst’s aircraft were often indistinguishable from those of the Luftwaffe, and could be seen wearing theatre bands. The Luftdienst grew in strength throughout the war, carrying out such tasks as transport and liaison, front-line supply, aircraft ferrying, target towing, rescue and casualty evacuation, photography and surveying (not over enemy territory) and increasing duties brought on by RAF bombing, such as dispersal of industry.
In such matters as intelligence, command and control, raid warning and medical services the Luftwaffe generally paralleled the RAF. The main difference was that in 1940 the Luftwaffe was doing the attacking and the fighting was over England and the Channel. There was not much need for intelligence or raid warning, and the chain of command could hardly have been simpler. Policy was decided by Goering (or, on 4 September, Hitler himself in the case of opening the Blitz on London) and orders sent by Enigma to Albert Kesselring (Luftflotte 2) and Hugo Sperrle (Luftflotte 3). Though almost all the crews were experienced in battle, a great deal had to be learned by experience; but the Luftwaffe never expected to fail to subdue the Royal Air Force.